Orla Murnaghan talks to Barry Tumelty, Counsel General of Ireland in Sao Paulo, about working in Foreign Affairs Can you tell me a little about your educational background? Sure. I started in Trinity doing law and French in 2001, so I suppose I always had the idea of during sometime international, not necessarily taking the traditional route of being a barrister or solicitor, but something in the international dimension. I did my Erasmus in Paris and I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to go to the European College in Bruges when I finished my undergrad. It was at a point in 2006 where there was quite a few opportunities so I actually was lucky to go directly from my Master’s to joining the Department of Foreign Affairs. What is your role in Irish foreign affairs? At the moment I am the Counsel General of Ireland in Sao Paulo. We have an embassy in Sao Paulo because it is such a big city, with a population of over 20 million people in the city and over 40 million in the state, there are great trading opportunities here and great opportunities to promote Ireland especially in research and business. We also work very closely with Enterprise Ireland, they have an office here beside us so we actually share what we call an Ireland-house arrangement: we are under the one roof, they have their client companies and we support Enterprise Ireland’s efforts but also work to promote Ireland more broadly, getting the image of Ireland out there and the profile of Ireland’s work with educational sectors in particular. At the moment about 16,000 Brazilian people go to Ireland every year to learn or improve their English. Many of them actually go on to third level in Ireland. That wasn’t happening about 10 years ago and is creating new interest between Ireland and Brazil. And new opportunities! Basically we find when you have those personal connections, then economic opportunities can open up and there is great potential down the road for trade between Ireland and Brazil to increase. Then there is a lot of cooperation at third level- so for example, the Brazilian government ran a scheme that was called Science without Borders which saw over 3300 Brazilians studying in Ireland for about a year each and that meant that a lot of research partnerships were formed - between Irish Universities and institutes of Technology, we have around 100 agreements in place at the moment
in universities. The Irish Research Council just confirmed in February an agreement with the Sao Paulo Research and Innovation Foundation, it is an area that is growing in significance and for research. So really the role of foreign affairs is very different so depending on where you are the nature of your work changes very dramatically. Is there a lot of variety in working in foreign affairs? Well I suppose the variety is fantastic. Diplomats can move. I had the opportunity to work in Brussels on multinational negotiations, working on legislation across all sorts of different areas of interest for Ireland… any area you can think off under the sun. But then I went to Mexico and Sao Paulo to promote Irish culture, and I also worked for example with the Department of the Taoiseach during our presidency of the European Union in 2013. And I have been able to work for a period on behalf of the protocol team and look after visits of VIPs into Ireland and also arrange a programme for the President when he travels abroad. I got to travel to a lot of different countries over the years, and get to meet the people in other countries and get to understand them a bit better. When you are living abroad you are trying to adapt and understand things from their perspective, to try and analyse the opportunities and relationships that can help Ireland. I think we put a lot of emphasis on our values so obviously in every mission we work to present our foreign policy objectives. This week, Ireland has just launched a new international development policy for a better world. We work to promote peace, disarmament, and security so Brazil has traditionally been a partner of multilateral force. Actually at the moment, Ireland is launching a major campaign to get elected onto the UN Security Council in 2021 so really that is something that is a focus for our mission. I think for a small country looking outwards we need to The Eagle Gazette Volume 5 Issue 2 · 17
